Older Millennials are now calling themselves 'Xennials'

Older Millennials are stepping into the limelight and
dubbing themselves "Xennials."

This label is being used to describe people born
between 1977 and 1983.

They grew up in the pre-social media age like the
"Gen X" generation.

But they've also adapted to today's digital
culture like Millennials during their
adulthood.

Older millennials, rejoice: A recently coined term will finally
validate your feeling that you don’t belong.

Being a “millennial” isn’t really a point of pride for
people born between approximately 1980 and 2000: This generation
is frequently called narcissistic,
entitled, mopey, and a host of other insults. Older
millennials, in particular, often shun the label; they came of
age before social media and smartphones, so they don’t appreciate being lumped
in with people who grew up with the ubiquitous internet.

These folks aren’t really millennials, but they’re not really
from the previous “Gen X” generation, either. They are
“Xennials,” a term that seems to have been introduced by GOOD
magazine in 2014 and has been popularized more recently. It’s a
useful label for people born between 1977 and 1983 that finally
frees them from generational purgatory.

“We use social media but can remember living life without it,”
explained a self-proclaimed Xennial in GOOD. “The
internet was not a part of our childhoods, but computers existed and there was something special
about the opportunity to use one.”

Typically, Xennials don’t have the apathy and cynicism associated
with the Gen X generation, but they also lack the dogged optimism
of millennials, who are said to overestimate their potential
because they were raised to believe that they were “special.”
Xennials fall somewhere in between these two extremes.

While Xennials are fluent in modern digital culture, they aren’t
chained to it and “have some ability, or at least a latent space
in our brains, to unplug.”

Economically, Xennials have seen it all. They are old enough to
remember the end of a long period of growth (following a small
recession) in the 1990s, but they came of age around the time
that the “dot-com
bubble” burst and saw the decline and major recession of the
2000s. In other words, they were “first given a sweet taste of
the good life, and then kicked in the face.”

Basically, Xennials aren’t too much of any one thing — and a
state of balance is usually better than an extreme. A Xennial
seems like a pretty good thing to be.